#$MATCH

#$&

The string matched by the last successful pattern match (not counting any matches hidden within a BLOCK or eval() enclosed by the current BLOCK).

The use of this variable anywhere in a program imposes a considerable performance penalty on all regular expression matches. To avoid this penalty, you can extract the same substring by using "@-". Starting with Perl 5.10, you can use the /p match flag and the ${^MATCH} variable to do the same thing for particular match operations.

This variable is read-only and dynamically-scoped.

Mnemonic: like & in some editors.

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